Butterfly

This week we have been studying Butterflies.  We've had some pretty cool crafts this week and a very neat caterpillar experiment :-)

 We made caterpillars our of egg cartons, paint, googly eyes, and pipe cleaners.  We also painted egg cartons to make the chrysalis that you can see in the last pictures below.

 This is our caterpillar experiment.  We ordered our caterpillar larva and when they came they were tiny but in a short amount of time grew bigger and then grew into chrysalises.  Now we've pinned them to our butterfly habitat so hopefully in 7-10 days we will have butterflies!

 You can see that we glued paper eggs on a leaf to signify the first stage of a butterfly's life, then we used our painted caterpillar for the second stage or larva stage, the painted chrysalis was used for the third stage or pupa stage, and we water colored our butterflies for the last stage or adult stage of the butterfly.

We really enjoyed this unit!!

Jewelry

Well, it looks like we will be doing school through the middle of June,  blah!  Our current unit has been on jewels and today the boys made necklaces.  I got some pretty fun pictures of this!  We used pipe cleaners and little strips of aluminum foil for our jewels.

 Charlie's face is priceless in this picture.  

I think they turned out pretty cute!  Very uncomfortable, but cute! 

Penguins and Icebergs

Its been a while so I thought we were due for a new blog post :-)  We've been studying wild animals recently.  We went to the zoo last week when we were learning about elephants and this week we have specifically been learning about penguins.  Today, we also learned about icebergs and made our own!  The boys really enjoyed this and I think tomorrow we will make some more icebergs of different sizes and shapes.

 We filled up plastic bags with different volumes of water.

 There's no picture of this but then we put them in the freezer.

 Just before bed, we got them out and floated them in the sink and observed how the majority of the "icebergs" were actually under the water.

 Johnny's penguin that he drew yesterday.

 I haven't shown any of Johnny's work in a while but here's an example of him being able to read words and then match them to the correct picture. (He made his map into a person, not sure why.)

Just some handwriting :-)

See you soon!

Cows!

We've been learning about farm animals and specifically cows this unit.  Today, we made butter..... I will probably not EVER be doing that again!  Too much work!  The boys pooped out after about 30 seconds and so I ended up shaking the jar for about 20 minutes.  Then we had a dairy party for lunch which consisted of cheese cubes, strawberry yogurt, biscuits with the fresh butter we made, and chocolate milk. 

 I know this has nothing to do with cows but I apparently took this last week when Charlie was on the letter L and forgot to post it, oops.

 Shaking our butter..

 Voila!

 Party



Valentine's Day

We made chocolate covered pretzels for Jesse for Valentine's Day.  Johnny would only help with the sprinkles because he doesn't like getting his hands all dirty.  Charlie on the other hand, doesn't mind his hand being covered in chocolate one bit!

Improv

Today, Charlie's cutting practice turned into he and Johnny wanting to use the scrap paper to make jack-o-lanterns and then that turned into them wanting to make the scrap paper from that project into roofs for some houses.  You gotta love improv craft time :-)

 Charlie's art projects are always a little on the "creative" side :-)  You gotta love a kid who can think outside the box!  (He did not get that from me.) 

 A very proper Jack-o-lantern.

I love my boys!

Blogging Break

I've been on a bit of a blogging break these past couple of weeks because we've had a lot going on.  Some things good and some things not so much.  Last Monday I went with a homeschooling friend to a Classical Conversations meeting because I am planning on enrolling by boys in the program for the next school year.  We checked out one particular location last Monday and tonight we are going to an info meeting for another location that is closest to our house.  Then, last Tuesday, we had a field trip to the Atlanta Center of Puppetry Arts to see their "Space" show.  Johnny is an extremely cautious child and isn't comfortable in new experiences so the minute we walked in and the theatre was dim he started getting nervous.  He layed down on the floor even before the show started and when it finally did, the lights went completely out (oh joy!) so he was very upset and basically layed there crying the whole time that he wanted to go home.  Poor Charlie was really enjoying the show but we had to leave a few minutes early because Johnny's crying was getting loud enough to be disruptive.  Next time, I believe that we will leave Johnny at home :-)  Our unit this last week and this week has been on isects and I checked out about a million books on different types of insects.  The boys have really enjoyed those.  We received our ants for our ant farm today but only 3 out of 25 were alive so I believe we will have to try again in the spring when travelling conditions are a little better for the ants.  We learned all about lady bugs yesterday and the boys each chose a rock to decorate as a ladybug.  They turned out really cute!  I have decided that you probably know by now all of the usual things we do since I've taken quite a few pictures of it all so I'm trying to only take pictures of new/more exciting things.  Here you go:

 Painting their ladybugs.

 Johnny can ready pretty much any 3 letter word you put in front of him.

 What a serious face!

Johnny's ladybug upclose.

Charlie's ladybug upclose.  Does anybody else think its strange that my 4 year old has defined pecs??  :-)